San Francisco Chronicle

2006

Forget Mickey Mouse

Oakland Ballet stages a darker and creepier "Sorcerer's Apprentice"

By Michael Wade Simpson

Surely the most unusual costumes to be seen on the local stage this year were worn by Jennifer Tierney and other members of the Oakland Ballet in a production of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" at the Calvin Simmons Theatre over the weekend.

Tierney, playing a broom that comes to life , was in toe shoes, a wood colored unitard and had broomsticks for arms that reached to the ground. The crutchlike extra extra limbs added tot the creepy quotient of this darker version of a tale made famous in the animated Disney film "Fantasia," but also offered an opportunity for some fascinating dancing.

Imagine a grand jete that doesn't go anywhere, a leap that takes off and then hangs in the air, held up between two long wooden supports. The broom costume (designed by Tracy Christensen) is reminiscent of one of the people-powered giraffes in the Broadway hit "The Lion King"; but the addition of the shoes, ballet technique and real dancing take the device way beyond image.

The choreographer Scott Rink, who created this piece for the Minnesota Dance Theatre and American Ballet Theatre Studio company in 2003, also scores a coup de theatre: when the Apprentice tries to get rid of his "problem" by attacking Tierney with an ax (a moment of questionable taste for young children, even if it's hidden behind a low scrim), he ends up multiplying the original problem - five more sets of broom arms suddenly rise from behind the scrim and head downstage to get him.

The piece is nightmarish to a certain extent - with dark lighting and fog, not to mention the huge puppet like Sorcerer played by three dancers in a gigantic, gauzy robe (Paunika Jones is constantly lifted and launched around the stage by two semihidden attendants, Joseph Copley and Matthew Linzer). The Apprentice, on the other hand, is an aw-shucks, all-American goof as portrayed by Gabriel Williams, who takes a moment to launch into mega -pirouette phrases whenever possible, but mostly is kept busy reacting to brooms to dance much. As the room starts to fill with water (effectively suggested by lengths of fabric "pouring "out of buckets that the broom dancers drag around the stage), there is a clever, moralistic reversal, a revision in the narrative by the choreographer.